American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Oh, yes you do.”

  Ian stooped to kiss her goodbye, as if nothing were wrong, for, for all he knew, his senses in such a tumult, his heart beating so alarmingly fast, nothing at all was wrong. Perhaps this was all play: love play of a kind to which he, in his straitlaced long-married propriety, was not accustomed.

  Meika slipped her arms around his neck and said, her mouth swollen as if with hurt or desire, “Yet you want, don’t you”—her eyes opened wide, yet dreamy and occluded—“so badly to hurt me. Right now. Don’t you. Tell the truth.”

  COMING UPON IAN that night, sitting at his desk with his head cradled in his arms and his glasses beside him, upside down as if removed in haste, Bianca said softly, “Daddy?” and Ian stirred guiltily, hearing her voice: so familiar a voice, yet not one he seemed, in this strange new mood that had come upon him, to have expected. “Are you all right, Daddy? Are you”—and Bianca paused, unable to bring herself to lay a hand on his shoulder, as if in fear of overstepping the amorphous but seemingly irrefragable border between them—“all right?”

  Ian looked up and groped for his glasses, saying, “Yes, yes of course,” smiling at her. “Of course. I was just resting my eyes.”

  Bianca apologized for the fact that dinner was so delayed. She’d begun, she said, at seven o’clock, and it seemed, now, to be nearly ten. “You must be starving,” she said.

  “Oh, yes,” Ian said, still smiling at her. “Yes, certainly.”

  HE HAD MADE up his mind that he would not, simply could not, see the woman again, let alone touch her, make love with her: grovel in her. For all that she’d said that day, or had taunted him with, was true; even as it was, of course, not true at all; in fact obscenely contrary to the truth.

  So he telephoned her and said, “Meika? I don’t think we should see each other again for a while.”

  Meika said, “I was thinking the same thing, actually.”

  There was an awkward pause. Ian could hear music in the background, a harsh calypso beat; could hear voices.

  Meika said, as if apologetically, “Ian, dear, the problem is that you are so easily hurt; I suppose I’m not accustomed to a man quite like you. It’s as if the outermost layer of your skin has been peeled off. Have you always been like this, or has it . . . does it have something to do, you know, with . . . the things that have happened to you?”

  Ian said flatly that he didn’t know. And that he had to hang up.

  Next morning, in court, he did not see Meika and was able, for the duration of that day—a day that passed in a haze of pain, involving, as it did, Samuel S. Lederer’s summary of his case against Ian McCullough—to forget about her; or, at any rate, not to think about her. But that night Meika called, merely, as she said, to say hello and to ask how the day had gone, and Ian broke down, and began to weep, and said, pleading, “Meika, I didn’t mean it, I hope you know I didn’t mean it, I love you, I want to see you again soon, tonight if I can, if we could”—while Meika, in a pretense of surprise, made comforting sounds over the telephone—“I’m not ready yet, I need you, I want to marry you, I love you, I love you more than he loves you; do you think, Meika, don’t answer me now—not yet—we might be married? Someday, when all this is settled, when . . . when we are both free, when—”

  When Ian’s extraordinary outburst had run its course, Meika gently, it may have been pityingly, “Why of course, Ian, I love you too, and I’m not ready yet either; of course I want to see you again. But not tonight, darling: I’m afraid Vaughn is back from San Diego.”

  6.

  Ian thought, It is as if I am attached to a great machine, Death. A robot with no will, no volition, no intelligence of my own.

  He was trying to urinate but could not. His muscles clenched in alarm . . . the muscles of his belly and groin. He was standing before a urinal in some place not known to him, of a clinical tiled white; but, badly as he wanted to urinate, his bladder bloated to the point of pain, nothing happened. And then—

  He woke, in his bed, on the verge of having urinated in his sleep. But woke in time. I am becoming an infant, he thought. They are killing me.

  THE TRIAL WAS entering its fifth week.

  After the prosecution completed its case, the defense duly filed a motion that the charge against Ian McCullough be dismissed and the trial itself ended. Ottinger’s argument was that the prosecution had failed to prove that any crime had been committed, de facto; the death of Mrs. McCullough had followed from an accident for which no one could be held accountable. He argued too that the prosecution had presented insufficient and merely circumstantial evidence; that there were no eyewitnesses to the “crime”; that there had been no motive established. And that the “vendetta” against his client was politically motivated.

  This, Judge Harmon seemed to seriously consider but in the end denied. So the trial continued, and, on the morning of March 24, Ottinger began his case, rising to remind the court (how diplomatic, Ian thought: “remind”) of the famous admonition of the fourteenth-century English philosopher William of Occam (i.e., Occam’s Razor): we are warned “never to multiply entities beyond simplicity.”

  For it was Ottinger’s central argument that no crime had been committed; though he and his client knew why a crime had been hypothetized and publicized. “The prosecution has said that this is a simple case, motivated by lust, greed, and barbaric selfishness,” Ottinger said. “And so, in a way, it is. But the ‘lust, greed, and barbaric selfishness’ are not attributes of my client; they are attributes of the authorities who have brought the outrageous charge of second-degree murder. . . .” And so it went.

  The argument offered by the defense, or, as Ian thought it, the narrative, was, of course, the very obverse of the prosecution’s. Where, previously, Dr. Ian McCullough had been a man of “deceptive civility,” a “passive-aggressive personality” of a kind prone to “repressed” violence, and susceptible, by way of alcohol or drugs, to an “explosive liberation” of said violence, Dr. Ian McCullough was now a man of “unfailing courtesy,” “kindness,” “generosity”: a model husband and father, a model citizen, a model of professional “brilliance” and “reliability”; admired by his colleagues, loved by his friends; “even-tempered,” “rational,” “reasonable”; even, in the passionate words of an Institute colleague (Denis Grinnell), “the most civilized man of my acquaintance.” Where, in previous weeks, he had been a “devious and systematic” adulterer, a “faithless” husband, sufficiently “coldhearted” not only to betray his wife but to lie to her and, as the evidence would seem to have shown, to commit an act of grievous physical harm against her, he was now an “unfailingly faithful and devoted” husband to his wife of twenty-six years, a man who “has always divided his time equally between his family and his profession,” with a reputation for . . . and so on and so forth. Ian recalled that the gods of antiquity observed a rule: none must cross the path of another’s humor.

  Yet he felt, with the passage of days, as the procession of defense witnesses came forward to take the stand in Ian McCullough’s behalf, to swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God, a yet more profound sense of shame. For now others, these so innocent and well-intentioned others, were publicly involved in his fate.

  FROM THE START, Nicholas Ottinger had made an excellent impression on the court. He was articulate, yet not too articulate; forthright, yet not overbearing; inclined at times to irony, but never, like his older adversary, to sarcasm. He seemed to possess a photographic memory and knew many things Ian was astonished to discover he knew (the make and date of Ian’s car, for instance), since Ian could not recall having told him. An attractive, well-dressed man of youthful middle age, with his dark tight-rippled hair and look of combative vigor; a sudden startling white smile; springy on his feet, yet dignified; and clearly very intelligent: a man, Ian thought, one would not wish for an enemy.

  His strategy, he told Ian, was to establish Ian’s “real” character in the jurors’ mind
s. This being done, he then shifted to the circumstances of the accident, drawing testimony from, among others, a Manhattan forensic specialist who claimed that the fractures to Glynnis’s skull “might easily have been caused by a fall.” (Again the X rays were evoked; the pointer brought into play. Again the jurors, so sedulously courted, looked on rapt with attention.) He re-called to the witness stand the chief paramedic; one of the young police officers who had entered the McCullough’s house on the night of the accident; the admitting physician at Hazelton Medical Center; even Dr. Flax, who repeated much of his testimony verbatim but became, under Ottinger’s persistent questioning of his medical career (i.e., the malpractice suits brought against Flax in 1983 and 1987, each settled out of court for an “undisclosed” sum), suddenly rather defensive. There was an entertaining sequence, taking up, in all, three full trial days, involving witnesses who had known Sigrid Hunt during the two-year tenure of her dance instructorship at Vassar and during the period of her engagement to Mr. Fermi Sabri: six young women and three young men, each of whom denied any knowledge of a “relationship” or, even, a “friendship” with Ian McCullough. (“I never heard of him, frankly.” “The name is unknown to me, except, y’know, from reading about the two of them in the papers.”)

  The most articulate of these witnesses was a young woman friend of Sigrid Hunt’s who had attended dance classes with her in Manhattan, years ago, and was now, like Hunt, an ex-dancer “on the fringes of the dance world”: living in SoHo and working as a waitress in a Seventh Avenue jazz club. Her name was Ichor Matthews—“Yes, sir, Ichor is my baptismal name”—and she had prematurely white hair, a high pale brow, a rapid, brittle, yet rather seductive voice. She wore a black jumpsuit with conspicuous silver buckles and zippers and high-heeled black boots.

  Ottinger asked, “To your knowledge, Miss Matthews, did Sigrid Hunt ever speak of ‘Dr. Ian McCullough’?”

  Ichor Matthews said, “Sigrid knew all sorts of people, she might have mentioned his name, or a name like that, but I truthfully don’t remember. People go in and out of all of our lives. . . .”

  “You don’t remember the name ‘Ian McCullough’?”

  “No, sir, I do not.”

  “Did she mention other men’s names, which you do remember?”

  “Oh, yes, certainly. We had friends in common. And there was this man, this Egyptian engineer, from a millionaire family in Cairo I think; she’d talk about him all the time because she was afraid of him, I think. But she was in love with him too; they were supposed to get married.”

  “Was it a formal engagement?”

  “‘Engaged’ is the word Sigrid used, yes.”

  “And what was Miss Hunt’s fiancé’s name?”

  “Fermi Sabri. But I think his real name was Sharif or something; I wasn’t ever clear about it.”

  “And how would you describe your friend’s relationship with Mr. Sabri?”

  “Dramatic.”

  “Meaning—?”

  “Dramatic is an understatement, actually. I happen to know that Sabri bullied her, threatened her, even beat her sometimes, though she never reported him. She might have been afraid he would have killed her, or she might have wanted to protect him because she loved him.”

  “Did you ever witness his ‘bullying’ of her?”

  “Oh, no. Nothing like that. I’d see her sometimes bruised around the face and neck, maybe the wrists; once there was a large ugly purplish-yellow bruise above her knee . . . but she said she had done it to herself. And I didn’t want to argue; I didn’t want to get into that. Because women like that, who let themselves be hurt by men, are almost always lying to protect them; and it makes me sick. Frankly.”

  “Did Miss Hunt appeal to anyone for help, to your knowledge?”

  “No. Not to my knowledge.”

  “How long were Miss Hunt and Mr. Sabri engaged?”

  “About eighteen months. Until she had an abortion, which he didn’t want her to have—which, in fact, he forbade her to have—and that was that.”

  “You say that Miss Hunt had an abortion? And was Fermi Sabri the father?”

  “Oh, definitely. Nobody else.”

  “When did the abortion take place?”

  “Maybe a year ago, about this time.”

  “And where?”

  “Sigrid was so worried about it, so frightened, I set it up for her myself, at a clinic called WomanSpace in Chelsea . . . staffed by women doctors, nurses. A wonderful place, and very safe. No men allowed anywhere on the premises. Sigrid didn’t want Fermi to know what she was doing; this was one of the times she was hiding out from him, staying with me or other friends.”

  “Did she ever, to your knowledge, stay with anyone in Hazelton?”

  “In Hazelton? Not to my knowledge.”

  “And you say she never, so far as you can remember, spoke of Ian McCullough?”

  “Sigrid did know people up in Hazelton, connected with the Institute, I think, older people, middle-aged people; I got the impression they were intellectuals, writers and such, and fairly well-to-do. She had this side to her, an utterly conventional side, admiring, even envying, people like that, a sort of bourgeois romantic streak. There was a woman in particular she admired, a food expert I think, but I don’t remember any names, and maybe she didn’t mention any names. Sigrid was the kind of girl, you might think you knew her, but it would turn out eventually that you didn’t; she would have another life somewhere else, an entirely different life . . . like the other side of the moon.”

  “In any case, Miss Matthews, Sigrid Hunt’s emotional life, during the time of which we’re speaking, was focused upon her fiancé primarily, and not upon another man?”

  “Oh, yes, certainly, I’d say that. No doubt about that.”

  “And what was Mr. Sabri like?”

  “I never actually met him, that’s the strange thing. I saw him a few times, the two of them in his car. . . .”

  “And what kind of car did Mr. Sabri drive?”

  “A Ferrari sports car, I don’t remember the name. Bright red. Blood red.”

  “A distinctive car?”

  “A distinctive car. He’d bring her places, or pick her up, but he wouldn’t get out; evidently didn’t want to be introduced to her American friends. He was jealous, possessive . . . that type.”

  “Was he jealous even of Miss Hunt’s women friends?”

  “I think he had the idea we were all lesbians or something. Because we looked after one another. He was crazy to take her back to Cairo with him . . . he just wanted her for himself.”

  “And where is Mr. Sabri now, do you know?”

  “Supposedly, he went back to Egypt. Afraid of being involved in this trial. Or for being blamed for Sigrid’s disappearing . . . whatever happened to her.”

  “What did happen to her, do you know?”

  “I have absolutely no idea, sir. I have answered that question quite a few times now.”

  “Put to you by whom?”

  “By the police.”

  “Had Sigrid Hunt ever disappeared in the past, to your knowledge?”

  “Yes she did, maybe not disappeared exactly, because someone always knew where she was, but she’s the kind to slip away, go into hiding, if things get unpleasant. Like I said, she’s the type to have another life, or lives, the way a dancer or an actor has roles, other modes of being. Not that Sigrid was consciously devious or anything, though I suppose, conventionally judged, she was, or is; it’s really just her character, the way she was born. She had been a quite promising dancer for a while, before the life began to wear her down like it does most of us, and finally she injured her foot, and that was that. Too much pain. And she was getting old. Like me.”

  “How old are you, Miss Matthews?”

  “Oh, Jesus! And I’m under oath! I’m twenty-seven. Going on twenty-eight.”

  AND THEN, ON another day, came Malcolm Oliver, to tell the court, at Ottinger’s invitation, about the Thiel-Edwards episode, as it had come to
be called: the case of police brutality in which Ian McCullough and other Hazelton area members of the American Civil Liberties Union became involved in early 1986.

  It seemed that, at approximately 2:00 A.M. of December 26, 1985, Henry Thiel, a thirty-one-year-old high school teacher from Mount Kisco, New York, was driving a friend, Darryl Edwards, twenty-eight, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Columbia University, home from a party in Hazelton-on-Hudson, when, on Charter Street (a narrow oneway street one block from and parallel to Hazelton’s main street), a vehicle that turned out to be an unmarked police car approached them head on, headlights blinding, and forced them to a sudden stop. At the same time, another unmarked car pulled up short behind them, its brakes squealing. Thinking they were going to be robbed and assaulted, if not murdered, Thiel and Edwards ducked down in their seats. Within seconds they heard three shots, and the windshield of Thiel’s car was shattered. With no warning, or no warning that either Thiel or Edwards heard, a police officer in the car in front of them had fired his pistol. At once, a second officer joined him, firing three or four times. There followed then, as witnesses (residents of a nearby apartment building) described it, a “barrage” of bullets, as police officers from both cars opened fire, shooting out most of the windows of Thiel’s car. Several people called police, and more units arrived at the scene. By this time Thiel and Edwards had been dragged out of their car, overpowered, beaten, kicked, and handcuffed, and forced into one of the squad cars. They were to be accused afterward of “resisting arrest” and “forcibly resisting arresting officers,” though no evidence would be offered to corroborate these charges.

  Both Thiel and Edwards, after being booked at Hazelton police headquarters, were taken to the Hazelton Medical Center, Thiel with a broken nose, severe facial lacerations, and several broken ribs; Edwards with similar facial injuries, broken ribs and fingers, and a fractured skull from having been, in his words, “struck repeatedly” with a billy club. (Why was Edwards beaten more severely than Thiel? Malcolm interjected, putting his question to the court. Because Edwards is black.)